Ten years ago I published Warrenpoint, a memoir of the first 18 years of my life. My father was sergeant-in-charge of the RUC in Warrenpoint, and we lived in "married quarters" there till he retired in September 1946 and the family dispersed. I went to Dublin, where I enrolled for a B.A. degree in Latin and English at UCD and, a few months later, entered the Royal Irish Academy of Music to study Lieder with Brian Boydell.
It has sometimes been suggested that I might attempt a sequel to Warrenpoint, but the suggestions have not been frequent or insistent. I have found it more agreeable to write other books than a hypothetical memoir called My Dublin. For one thing, Dublin was never mine as it was, say, Anthony Cronin's. I played no part in its literary life, or felt any ambition to become a writer. I could not write a book like Cronin's Dead as Doornails, rampant as it is with Dublin's literary and social life. I played a small part in the musical life of the city, mainly as one of Boydell's pupils, but I cannot claim to have left any mark.
A friendship from those days I wish I had taken better care of was with the late Donald Davie. When I became an assistant lecturer at UCD, he was my more-than-equal and opposite number at TCD, one of H.O. White's colleagues in the English Department. He was six years older than me and superior in every respect. He was a poet and critic of emphasised moral bearing. His chosen masters were those poets from Samuel Johnson to Yvor Winters who practiced the art of "urbane and momentous statement". Of the modern poets, he most admired Ezra Pound. W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot were problems to Davie. He regarded them as great writers in some sense, but rotten with subjectivity and egotism.
I was much more concessive and latitudinarian, and wanted to remain open to different styles. There was no point in bringing in an Act of Uniformity against poets. Davie thought that a poem or a novel was trivial unless it respected the palpable, objective character of the things it referred to. He found it scandalous that in "Coole and Ballylee, 1931" Yeats, looking at a swan in flight, cries out: "Another emblem there!" Davie thought that Yeats did not really look at the swan, being in such a hurry to turn it into a emblem and coerce it into his poetics.
In his rooms at TCD, Davie talked to me about two analogies for poetry. Eliot's poems were "poetry as music," Pound's "poetry as sculpture." Davie favoured sculpture and painting, and distrusted those writers, from Mallarme and Pater to Eliot, who cultivated the inwardness and music of words.
Years later, Davie and I quarreled. When he published his second book on Pound, I reviewed it in Partisan Review and felt obliged to account for the striking changes of mind between the two books. Poems he praised in the first book, he disparaged in the second. I pointed out that there was a corresponding discrepancy in Davie's poems. Some of them are morally strict, rigorous, "Augustan", but in other poems he evidently wanted to break loose and write without chains, like Hart Crane and Rimbaud. Besides, I said, "the relation between Davie's mind and its contents has always been experimental".
That sentence brought our friendship to an end. He thought I meant: "Davie can't think straight." He wrote me a letter, four cramped, hand-written pages so wounded and wounding that I could not reply to them. For many years we did not speak to each other. When he published a memoir, These the Companions, he did not mention me. At a conference, his wife Doreen refused to shake my hand. But 10 or more years later, when I asked the BBC to invite him to take part in a documentary radio programme I was preparing on Eliot, Davie agreed. When we met in London, he growled: "I'm glad we're at least on speaking terms". We went into the studio and he performed magnificently on Eliot and The Waste Land. I never met him again. I'm sorry. I should have done better and been more thoughtful.
Eliot was always an obstacle between us. Davie seemed never to be able to make up his mind about him, and he resented being caught in doubt and forced into equivocation whenever Eliot's poems came up between us, as they often and inevitably did. He was not willing to do what Pound did with Yeats, Joyce, and Eliot: decide that they were great writers and help them get on with their lives, however different they were from him in the bias and commitment of their genius. Among contemporary critics, Davie admired Hugh Kenner above all; another Poundian and an adept of sculptured rhyme. He regarded my critical masters - Kenneth Burke, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, and John Crowe Ransom - as amateur sages, minor prophets: not the real moral thing.
I did not realise, during my early years in Dublin, how crucial Eliot was to me. His influence as a critic was immense. It was virtually impossible to read poems without feeling that he was looking over my shoulder and reading the same words in a far more intelligent and demanding spirit. I was concerned not with the influence of one writer on another but with presence; the sense of a writer exerting pressure, line by line, on one's reading. Gradually Eliot began to fill the space of my intellectual life. He seemed to be responsible for every perception I arrived at - if I arrived at any - and even for those I achieved by disagreeing with him.
Reading Milton, I had to engage with Eliot's Milton before thinking of C.S. Lewis's or anyone else's. A few students at UCD complained to Professor J.J. Hogan that I was making them read things that were not on the course - poems by John Donne and an essay by T. S. Eliot called "The Metaphysical Poets". What else could I do? Meanwhile Eliot's early poems, from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to "Ash-Wednesday" and "Marina", took possession of my mind, their music could not be resisted:
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
So I have written a book called Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot instead of a memoir of my first years in Dublin. But it is a memoir, in part and between the lines. As for its title: I thought of calling it My T. S. Eliot, on the precedent of Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson. But that notion didn't survive: it seemed to express mainly my pride of possession. I tried again for a title. In "The Song of the Happy Shepherd" Yeats wrote: "Words alone are certain good". But it was Eliot, more than Yeats, who observed that principle, with whatever misgiving. I wish I could give Donald Davie a copy of my book. Not that it would persuade him to accept my Eliot.
Denis Donoghue is currently University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University.
Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, is published by Yale University Press, and will be reviewed next week by Frank Kermode